Genocide Commemoration Day

Today marks the beginning of a national week of mourning in remembrance of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. During this week, flags will fly at half-mast, weddings and other festivities will be banned, conferences and debates will be held throughout the country and the recently-discovered remains of victims will receive proper burial. The official commemoration ceremony will take place this afternoon in Nyamata, a town south of Kigali. Below is a description of Nyamata published by the BBC.

Remembering the victims of Nyamata
by: Mark Doyle (written in June 1994)

The first thing was the smell. We were approaching a church outside Nyamata and the vile smell of rotting flesh was the first signal of what we were about to see.

Outside the church, the grounds were littered with bodies, some mutilated, all in contorted positions. I recall having to step very carefully to avoid treading on one of the corpses of body parts.

I didn't count the dead because what I saw inside made accurate counting impossible. In the thin blue light provided by the remains of a broken stained glass window, I saw the ground was thick with bodies - in places, three or four deep.

There were certainly hundreds of genocide victims in and around the church at Nyamata that day. Some had been killed with machetes, but shrapnel holes on the inside of the brick walls of the church testified to grenades having been thrown into the crowded building before the killers managed to get in to finish their work.

It was clear from the sheer number of corpses in the church that the victims had gathered there because they thought it would provide them with shelter.

In the church grounds, apart from bodies, there were little piles of clothes strewn on the ground. They were the bundled together belongings of people who had fled their homes believing they had a chance of escaping the genocide.